3am
REPORTTHE TRAVELLING BLUES OF TOM
PAULIN’S WILLIAM HAZLITT: A REPORT ON THE HAZLITT DAY-SCHOOL AT St
CATHERINE’S COLLEGE, OXFORD (16 June 2001)

"Tom Paulin began
reinventing Hazlitt as a travel writer. Usually a crap genre, travel
writing by Hazlitt was a way of writing the
Republican Sublime, a political writing that completed the urgent detail
of a still-life by injecting movement, life, gusto, into his accounts of
his European journeys. Travel writing then became something more like the
stuff out of blues singers, fiddlers, balladeers, travellers and ramblers
-- on the road like Woodie Guthrie rather than on holiday with Peter Mayle". by
Richard Marshall

“The purpose of writing is to make it
happen’ -- William Burroughs to Jasper Johns (1). ‘So is Hazlitt kind of
like Burroughs, or Stewart Home (2) – into the art of plagiarism?’ Duncan
Wu crosses out the thought. ‘Burroughs is sloppy with his plagiarism.
Hazlitt isn’t doing plagiarism. He’s taking something and turning it into
gold.’ The influence of art has a long time effect -- Tom Paulin wonders
about Joyce and Hazlitt -- the question of using sources, running them out
into a new deal, so -- ‘Nothing is new. Everybody just gets their chance
-- most of it sounds recycled and shuffled around, watered down. Even rap
records. I love that stuff but it’s not new, you need to hear that stuff
all the time…there was this one guy, Big Brown, he wore a jail blanket… he
was like Othello, he’d recite epics like some Roman orator, really
backwater stuff though, Stagger Lee, Cocaine Smitty, Hattiesburg. Where
were the record companies when he was around? Even him though, it’s like
it was done thirty years before that… and God knows when else…’ -- this is
Bob Dylan speaking in 1985 pinning down some of the wings of this
conversation that’s taking place after the day’s done -- Hazlitt working
out of the past to claim the present like a rambling bluesman and Duncan
Wu like a strong record company man who heard it right and came in as the
good guy. Who was there.

So these questions reach back through the long time. Wu
put together The Selected Writings Of William Hazlitt (3) -- the
Pickering Masters -- all nine solid hardback volumes like mysterious trace
deposits of the day, the long distance time-machines this short time
secured. Oxford ,16th June, 2001, a day of reaching back, reinventing,
rediscovering, restoring the crucial years of the crucial life of 1778 to
1830 -- and what happened was an idea -- the idea that Hazlitt, now no
longer neglected, is necessary reading, like Shakespeare, Hazlitt the
greatest critic ever, the greatest prose master, the dissenter we need,
and need now. A troublemaker. An old time republican dissenter genius.

‘But do you think that Hazlitt believed in the idea of
multi personality?’ -- David Bromwich, a consulting editor of these
magnificent books fired his question at Uttar Natarajan in the afternoon
session and the connection between the eighteenth century Romantics and
current sci fi became an eerie sub-current. For a moment it was possible
to connect Hazlitt with cyber-punk, with Arnie in The 6th Day, with
Philip K Dick -- and a whole raft of Star Trek episodes. Indeed
Hazlitt’s philosophical metaphysic were forgrounded in the discussions
throughout the day and subtle divisions and crackling inventiveness
churned up the smooth surface smarm of academe’s usual killjoy naval-talk
to create a deep and fertile furrow of energies. This was what a Hazlitt
conference should be like: where argument, division -- that overgiven
in-your-face quality of argumentative thinking -- is part of the reason
Hazlitt is one of the most important figures of his time. More important
than Wordsworth. More important than Shelley. Than any of them.

Bromwich spoke in the morning -- ‘On Critical character’
as did Jonathan Bate who discussed the green issue and Hazlitt in his talk
‘halfstrangers in the canon.’ AC Grayling seized on Hazlitt’s
philosophical arguments in his piece ‘ Ethics and the Self in Hazlitt’ but
this was a slight piece of work compared with the heavyweight contribution
from Goldsmith College’s Uttara Natarajan who covered much of the same
ground in a brilliant essay ‘Shelley’s Hazlitt’ -- brilliant because she
seemed to seize upon the argument about imaginative sympathy and
disinterestedness in a manner which exemplified the thesis as well as
explicated it. Here was where the conference really burned up with the
crackling fired up noise of big thinking and big language -- it was a
bravado performance which combined panache and lovely cadence with
incisive strong thought. What she did was explicate Hazlitt’s
transcendental argument about the possibility of disinterestedness as
being a necessary feature of having the idea of a self -- it was this that
prompted Bromwich’s question about multiple personalities -- something he
claimed Shelley totally believed in.

Before this John Whale had already set up an argument
for placing the Liber Amoris at the centre of Hazlitt’s work -- to
some of us this work is deeply nasty and misogynist. And so why did he
write it? In 1820 Hazlitt moved to new lodgings in Southampton Buildings
and promptly fell in love with his landlady’s daughter, Sarah Walker.
Liber Amoris tells quite candidly the story of this obsessive
futile passion, which ended disastrously when Walker revealed that she had
been unfaithful to Hazlitt all along. An alternative view to that of
Whale’s might suggest that if by placing this work centrally you were
maintaining the view of Hazlitt as a masculinist Romantic then this would
not be a good idea -- and clearly Hazlitt’s views on women do sometimes
seem to be closer to our own Lord Archer’s than his many fans like to
admit. If placing Liber Amoris to the fore is to signal a support
for this type of ugly sexist stuff then Whale’s Hazlitt seems to be a bad
Hazlitt to have. In the end though, this wasn’t the view of Hazlitt we
heard from others and Natarajan just didn’t find anything in Liber
Amoris crucial to anything at all.

It seems however, that you could argue that just as in
his prose Hazlitt wanted to keep everything moving -- he resisted the
deadness of still-life by injecting smoke into scenes, great accidents of
movement, so the scene lived, changed, like the questing mind itself -- so
maybe his weird passion was part of this same motivation, an attempt to
resist the pressure of an inert married life through a kind of sexual
fury, the fathomless bundle of incoherence that sits down to breakfast,
reaching out to be more type than man and more passion than type. It’s
this that really buries into your head when you read Hazlitt -- you’re
asking yourself the same kind of mad questions that he asked of, say, the
sea ‘rolled round the earth, smiling in its sleep, waked into fury,
fathomless, boundless, a huge world of water-drops -- whence it is, wither
goes it, is it of eternity or of nothing?’ -- well, this is extraordinary
stuff, vital, its a necessary richness, and is the same kind of thing that
happens when you hear a creative genius like Dylan questioning and
answering his own voice: ‘When did Abraham break his father’s idols? I
think it was last Tuesday’ (Interview given in1985).

But the final shot of the day was the hour and a quarter
plenary lecture by Tom Paulin who began reinventing Hazlitt as a travel
writer. Usually a crap genre, travel writing by Hazlitt was a
way of writing the Republican Sublime, a political writing
that completed the urgent detail of a still-life by injecting movement,
life, gusto, into his accounts of his European journeys. Travel writing
then became something more like the stuff out of blues singers, fiddlers,
balladeers, travellers and ramblers -- on the road like Woodie Guthrie
rather than on holiday with Peter Mayle. The lecture was itself a serious,
crazy, greased-up lightning talk -- it fair darted and jabbed along,
unflinched by asides and sudden insights which seemed to be hitting his
mind just then, there, at the time he spoke. It was one of those times
when you see thinking happening, the grapple and dash of a kind of
inspired erudite thought, and it was the sometime stupendous dazzle of
what might be done, must be done, in great English prose.

Paulin is probably the closest we get in the present day
to the qualities most admired in Hazlitt --‘prose that … went the nearest
to the verge of poetry and yet never fell over’. To this business of prose
-- that’s the heart of the thing for Paulin’s Hazlitt -- prose as being
different from poetry ‘like the chamois from the eagle: it climbs to an
almost equal height, touches upon a cloud, overlooks a precipice, is
picturesque, sublime – but all the while, instead of soaring through the
air, it stands upon a rocky cliff, clambers up by abrupt and intricate
ways, and browses on the roughest bark, or crops the tender flower.’ So in
Paulin’s lecture we were given the still-life possibility of a lecture
which he then detonated through injecting the ‘smoke’ of asides, thoughts
happening to the moment, to now, a kind of listening-in quality so you
were given the impression that he too, Paulin himself, was learning off
whatever he was saying and being surprised, woken up, amused, scandalised
or whatever by the things he was hearing . The sound of the prose: Paulin
read Hazlitt’s lines and pounced on the sounds, the cadences and their
connections, Paulin’s approach turns Hazlitt into some improvisory
bluesman like Robert Johnson or perhaps a fairground preacherman,
restlessly trying out for some truth through perfecting a strong prose
style. Hazlitt’s never felt more like a live presence than in the hands of this Paulin.
It's a writing that works
out of the dissenting, republican flow of Bunyon, Defoe, Edwards,
Melville, Twain and all that. Kind of miraculous.

Throughout there’s this argument within Hazlitt --
Hazlitt tormenting himself with this argument about whether what he is
doing -- working prose to its final upper limits -- can ever have the
reach of poetry. It’s a question for our times too, where the idea that
some of our greatest writers might be now essayists, diarists, letter
writers (think of Norman Mailer, Christopher Hitchens, Hunter S Thompson,
Gore Vidal, Iain Sinclair, Tom Paulin himself ) there’s a case for saying
that if we’re going to value these in the future it’s going to be their
non-fiction prose that carries them on. So maybe this is indeed a time for
Hazlitt.